GE's chief innovation consultant

Is going to be none other than Vijay Govindarajan the co-author of "10 rules for strategic innovators"

Says Govindarajan: “My area of expertise is how to create breakthrough businesses, while managing the current business. And this is what I will do at GE as well.” This was also a theme that Govindarahan addressed in the bestselling book ‘10 Rules for strategic Innovators’ (co-authored with Chris Trimble).

Jeffery Immelt has been pushing innovation at GE ever since he took over in 2001. The idea is to grow though organic innovation insted of just acquiring companies. GE has identified six areas to infrastruture, demographics, emerging markets, digital technologies and financial liquidity. Each of these business present tremendous opportunities to create break through businesses, says Govindarajan. For instance3, demographic changes are leading to a huge healthcare needs in the coming 50 years.
This means GE needs to identify these needs now and see how it can address them through its diagonostics business.

This is the first time GE has created the position of chief innovation consultant. Govindarajan will perform three roles during his one year stint at the company (he will return to Tuck in 2009): teaching its top 600 executives and teams, consulting on a few innovation projects and consulting to GE executives who want to develop their ideas.

“GE does an extremely good job of integrating what they teach at their development center in Crotonville with actually growth strategy,” says Govindarajan. A lot of the projects he will take on will involve individual GE units all over the world.

I personally think that the most impactful of these activities would be teaching those 600 executives innovation. However, it does seem funny for Edison's company to hire an innovation consultant, IMHO :-)

Check out Vijay's blog here. It's not very frequently updated, alas :(

Yellojobs.com and NDTVjobs.com split and Yahoo HotJobs on Facebook

I got a press release from Aditya Kumar of Yellojobs.com who informs me that NDTV and Yellojobs.com are breaking up. That was a short one year long marriage. I guess it all goes with their philosophy of cutting out the middleman.

Dr. Andreas Koestler, CEO, Yellojobs.com Pte Ltd said “Yellojobs.com has revolutionized the world-wide job market by introducing our patented ‘Referral Recruitment’ model. We have achieved tremendous success in India and will continue to focus on the Indian market. We have recently launched in Thailand and are extending our services to many more countries around the world.”

Vikramjit Singh Sahaye, GM (India) for Yellojobs.com says: “NDTVjobs.com has been a very fruitful marketing alliance with NDTV and served the mutual purpose of getting a heads up in the internet jobs space in India. The entire site is fully created, owned & managed by Yellojobs.com. We’ve pioneered to start a Public referral system for recruitments and received an extremely encouraging response from users on YelloRewards. This is yet just the beginning since there’s a lot more to come that will add value & excitement in recruitment processes.”

On other job board related news Yahoo's HotJobs launched an app for Facebook. Looks like FB is the new google, at least in the US. Unless you are visible on FB you don't exist for at least Gen Y, I guess. I know that Jobster is really pushing their FB app, even giving it more visibility than their website. Even CollegeRecruiter.com has a FB app that is gaining traction. Yahoo's HotJobs is the first of the big names however to migrate to Facebook and embrace social networking in all its glory. Will we see the Monsters and Careerbuilders follow suit?

And I wonder when Indian jobsites like Naukri and Clickjobs will enter Facebook. It would be a great way to target NRIs and Indian students studying in the US for jobs in India. Even resident Indians are migrating slowly to FB from sites like Orkut.

Am part of the Press?

This was a surprise ! Reffster's site In the Press lists this blog as the first place that broke the Reffster story. There's a good bit of discussion developing in the comments to that post. Check it out.

Does this mean I can get access to the Press Club? ;-))

Indian companies develop leaders better?

Indian companies rank high on global leadership list:

"four Indian companies have made it this year to the global list of Top Companies for Leaders-2007, a survey conducted by Hewitt Associates in partnership with The RBL Group and Fortune Magazine. These companies include Hindustan Unilever (HUL, ranked No 4), Infosys (10), ICICI Bank (19) and Wipro (20). The survey covered 548 organisations in 41 countries. Almost 20% of companies in the global list come from India, giving it the second highest representation on the list after the US. In the Asia Pacific ranking, 50% of the companies are Indian."

Good to hear that. Next year hope that a lot more Indian firms get featured on the list. It's not just good to do. It's an imperative!

Talent Management in Consulting firms

David Maister, author and professional services expert has a deep insight on his blog.

There is a widespread misunderstanding that good management means being "soft." In fact, holding on to the best and the brightest is NOT about making the firm less demanding: it is about making sure that the organization provides fast-track learning opportunties and (as Ms. Hymowitz pointed out) opportunities for people to take on lots of extra responsibility early. That DOESN'T challenge the business model of the firm (as some senior people fear) but it DOES challenge the security of the senior people. It means they must be willing to delegate more, and keep moving on to new things themselves, so that they are not the bottleneck to achievement.

When good people have to grow in their careers they want different things from their firm. Some might want flexibility, some might want a larger portfolio to manage, some new markets to develop and others might want to focus on new products and offerings. The common point is a growth in the complexity of work and things that challenge them.

This means leaders have to focus on innovation - because the development of the organization is linked to the development of its key people.

Work Life Balance

What exactly is work life balance? What is the 'balance' between work and life? And how different is 'life' from work?

As Abhijit says:

To be ahead of the competition, we are all putting in longer hours at the workplace. How many of you still pursue the hobbies and sports that gave us so much joy and meaning when we were growing up. If we revived them today, those would rejuvenate us and prevent burnout in the workplace. WLB means being able to find the time for the roles that rejuvenate. That could mean being with family for some or listening to music or going for a trek to discover Nature.

And Rob blogs about a book;

Larry Winget's book It's Called Work For a Reason: Your Success Is Your Own Damn Fault is one of the most unique business books I have ever read. The gist of the book is that stuff doesn't get done at your office because people aren't working, they are goofing off.

So what is the option to these two extreme positions? Between achieving success by sacrificing life or by choosing life and sacrificing the normal trappings of success.

The disconnect is that we have different expectations from work. For some of us, work is the path to a good life. We do not necessarily love what we do, but we do it for the things we get materially or emotionally by doing it. The car, the apartment, best schools for the kids.

For others, the reason of work is not the ends but work itself. As Karthik mentions in his email signature, a quote by Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes - "the profession is its own reward"

The first group of people want or aspire for Work Life balance. That's because in their minds the two are distinct entities. For the second group, work is life and life is work. There is no way they can segregate the two.

Both these groups look at the other and thinks they are better off than the other side. But are they really? Who are we to say?

Which group do you belong to?

Experience.com provides opportunities for internships and entry level job seekers.

Big 4 using Web 2.0 and social media for hiring

Interesting article (Hat-tip: Praneeth Reddy) which shows how supposedly conservative accounting firms are embracing social media and the web to reach Gen Y:

To lure candidates steeped in Facebook and YouTube, the Big Four are turning to the Web. Deloitte & Touche asked employees to make short videos about their experiences at the company. The videos were a way "of taking the aspects of social networking and experimenting on how you can use the new tools of today to move forward into a workplace of the future," said Cathy Benko, chief talent officer. About 400 videos were made, and the 14 best will be posted on YouTube and used on campuses.

Ernst & Young is holding a contest at 75 colleges, asking students why people should become accountants. Dan Black, director of campus recruiting, said regional winners will get $1,000 and, in some cases, iPhones. And the winning team will join CEO James Turley on a business trip. "We're trying to show younger students we can connect to them, that we understand they are different, and we're a firm where they can come in and do their best," he said.

There are so many jobs that are considered cool by college students of Generation Y that the accounting profession and other professions like it will have to think differently about their entry level hiring strategy.

Am on Socialmedian

Socialmedian is a new blog by Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg. As the site description states: In social media, we are all the median.

So when Jason asked what I thought about social media, I was glad to respond. Here are my answers to Jason's questions.

On Consulting and Humility

Nimmy wonders:

Consulting is all about asking the right questions and then listening carefully to the explicit and 'unstated' responses....including the body language and underlying people dynamics. To ask the right questions requires deep thought and reflection and a good understanding of fundamental concepts. Listening requires patience, humility and the like. Then isn't it surprising that one finds so much arrogance in the field?!

Well it is not so surprising, because a lot of activities that get carried out in the name of consulting does not fall in the domain of facilitative consulting.

Take the case of a client of mine who gives me a pre-prepared training material content and tells me that I have to deliver that training program for his employees. I am acting as a facilitative consultant in that relationship? Not really. I am, as OD consultant Peter Block says in his book Flawless Consulting, a pair of hands.

Or take another example... a client approaches me to carry out a survey of employee grievance management processes in a particular industry and to suggest what his organization should do. This is also not a true facilitative consulting process. Here I act as a "expertise" consultant and really am not bothered what the client does with my recommendation after I leave the scene.

The arrogance that Nimmy is thinking about is displayed by consultants when they operate in the above two modes - of expertise and of being a pair of hands. Clients go for such consultants when the skill does not exist in the organization and there is no business case for having it in the organization after the activity gets over.

So what is facilitative consulting?

Facilitative consulting is the process of consulting that results in an increase of the capability of the client after the consulting engagement is over. In this work the client does "the work" and the work of the consultant is to focus on the process of the work.

Yes it is possible for the expertise and the pair of hands consultants to also work facilitatively but the desire for further billing and having clients depend on them takes over any such altruistic thoughts.

As the Organization Development blog states:

Instead of one smart consultant figuring everything out, a group of clients who do the work on a daily basis--and have a stake in improving it--bring together their knowledge, experience, and motivation to assess current ways of operating, consider current obstacles to achieving intended goals, analyze underlying systemic causes for the difficulties, generate and assess options for improvement, and take responsibility for planning and implementing those changes. And the OD consultant? S/he makes it easier for them to do all this together, by creating and managing a forum for these conversations, and providing relevant questions for the group and its manager to consider as they proceed through this self-managed process-improvement work.

We facilitate--make communication easier for others. But that doesn't mean what we do is easy. It takes a special expertise to focus on implicit aspects of a discussion; an ability to invite shared inquiry into the usually unspoken assumptions about clients' work together; a willingness to control the process of discussion while giving control of the content or substance to members of the organization, who after all have a stake in making their own work more satisfying and effective.

Indian youth - No cause to fret

I guess every generation thinks that the one following it is careless and indisciplined. See how the boomers react to Gen X and how Gen X reacts to Gen Y or the Millenials as they are called.

The generation who were students in India in the 1970s often say that today's generation is no longer looking for anything else apart from their own personal self-gratification. Not so, says this HT journalist in this article:

The majority of the youth is neither hedonistic nor irresponsible. Barring the two per cent who dominate Page 3, many actually aspire to be changemakers, and are disturbed by the growing inequities.

Take the recent four-part series titled India GenNext aired on a news channel. The survey of youthful aspirations and solutions for India, at arguably some of India’s top B-schools — IIM (Ahmedabad) ISB (Hyderabad), FMS ( Delhi) and XLRI (Jamshedpur) — was heartening. Cutting across regions and income-groups, the key issues disturbing India’s brightest were poverty, illiteracy and health. In an impassioned group discussion, they highlighted the urgent need for inclusive growth. In fact, they coined a new term — Personal Social Responsibility — rather than the jaded Corporate Social Responsibility. Many rued the fact that corporate India’s top-down approach wasn’t working, as it left many out in the cold. The anchor of the series, herself a B-school grad, was stunned by the response. Their first reaction was: “These are issues we would love to talk about. We are sick of giving bites on reservation and the highest placements in our college. Nobody ever asks us these questions.” Sadly, the media seldom asks the right questions.

Find Diversity employment at DiversityJobs.com.

Linkedin adds pin code search to India regions

In case you have a profile on linkedin and have entered your pin code in your profile, your profile now shows which city area you live in.

Check my post on the Linkedin Business Discussion Index blog for details.


Find thousands of Hispanic jobs at LatPro.com.

A.T. Kearney to go green

A.T. Kearney Announces Worldwide Sustainability Initiative and Commits to Moving to a Carbon-Neutral Consulting Service Over the Next Two Years

Wow ! Now I wonder who'll follow next?

Consulting firms like to flaunt their commitment to sustainable development and work with not-profits to brand themselves in the marketplace. ATK's announcement should trigger a lot of "me-too" responses from the other consulting giants. Reducing travel might be the best thing that happens for the consultants too

Rob to sell Businesspundit

I saw Rob's post on Twitter about it and then I read his post. I envy him the courage to walk away from his creation and I know that it takes a man of courage to do that. Rob's was one the first business oriented blogs that I started to read and loved his views because they were not customised as he says to "say what people want to hear"

His posts are deeply thought out and challenge people to think differently. Apparently people don't like doing that. I love it, but I guess not everybody does. Rob was one of the people to always question new fads and one line that stays in my mind after so many posts is "If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is"

Rob is a skeptic. In the world that values quick fixes and instant solutions, that is a rare ability. He says that Businesspundit's technorati rankings have been falling and that's sad. I think it's the bane of media of any form. Once others appear who give people views that don't contradict their worldview and don't make them nervous, they lose ground.

Thankfully Rob will still be at Businesspundit until February, but I guess after that I'll unsubscribe. A blog is not a newspaper or TV channel. It is the person whose voice gets articulated in the blog.

For me Rob May will always be Businesspundit.

Retention Quotient Instrument

Frequent guest contributor R Karthik shares the Retention Quotient Instrument (Click on above image to see it in detail)

When i came across this instrument on National HRD network's quarterly journal of May '07, the first thing i did was rate my organization on the parameters of how retention-focussed we are. I realize now, when iam having to broadcast it to an audience that i haven't done a fair job at all with my hand-writing. My responses to the closed-ended questionnaire are given below:

Q1. No such approach followed for all lateral hires in all levels, but may be yes for freshers (partial-yes)

Q2. Experience (in years) & skills alone drive the selection decisions

Q3. Not instituted as a practice and discipline not found in operationalizing it as a org-wide standard format (partial-yes)

Q4. No

Q5. Only long-service award to employees (partial-yes)

Q6. Only appraisal feedback

Q7. MITR (employee professional assistance program) & GENIE (personal shoppers & assistant program)

Q8. Weekly polls & policy meetings

Q9. Annual Employee Engagement Survey

Q10. Launch of automated system for enhanced separation experience

Q11. BPR initiatives & Employee 1st program

Q12. No critical-turnover analysis (partial-yes)

In toto, 6 affirmative ratings and 3 'partial-yes' ratings give my organization a score of 7&1/2 on a scale of 12.

This is a good-way of taking stock of where you stand as a HR organization on an important aspect called 'Retention-Quotient'.(There goes the jargonizer in me:) )

Filling the Talent Gap

How to Fill the Talent Gap - WSJ.com

Interesting article that focuses on the truth that really matters:

Successful companies understand and exploit the capabilities that let them provide unique value to their customers. Your talent-management initiatives should focus on building those capabilities among your employees.

The best-in-class firms that we examined had talent processes that were marked by deep commitment, high levels of engagement and widespread accountability among senior leaders, line managers, human resources and the talent prospects themselves.

P&G for instance, focuses on identifying and developing talent at the local level and then integrating those people into regional and group talent pools as their careers progress. The company has an automated tracking system that can identify candidates inside the company who have the skills and experiences required for important assignments around the world -- letting the company fill key roles much faster and more efficiently. The company also tracks its hires and monitors the success rates of these people placed into key roles.

The issue is, business tactics and strategy changes from month to month and year to year, however the result of serious talent management interventions only come to light in the long term. So when the direction of the firm changes, the talent management systems need to be evaluated and changed as soon as possible, and calls for change management efforts to address uncertainty amongst the minds of employees. Hence if a business really wants its strategy to be executed as it plans then thought has to be given to how the talent management systems will also change. And this conversation has to be proactive and not reactive.

Microsoft drinks to the Blue Monster

Microsoft drinks to the Blue Monster


I'm a big fan of Hugh McLeod and feel he's amongst the handful of people who really understand this new world of social media.

If you want to understand it, start reading his blog ! The text is bonus, I really read it for the cartoons !

Updates on my website

Have added a page for articles that I've written and which have got published somewhere, and the other is being featured in the news and other social media.

Anybody else using the Google Page Creator well? Any idea how I can add third party scripts to the pages?

Google tells me that

Every Google Page Creator site automatically has a mobile edition. So when people visit your site from their mobile browser, they will see a version optimized for their particular phone.

So anyone viewing the page over their mobile phone has any feedback? I can't see it on my browser thanks to my Account with my service provider...

Another update: Get HR news from Google news by taking a look at the "HR in the news" widget in the right hand sidebar almost near the bottom, below the "From the Blogosphere" widget. Hope you like it :-)

Google ties up with CapGemini

Is this the start of enterprise 2.0 ? TechCrunch reports:

CapGemini, who control a million or so enterprise desktops and are one of the largest IT consulting businesses, will offer Google Apps to its clients. Google Apps include services such as email, calendar, word processing and spreedsheets.

CapGemini, which has distributed desktop applications from Microsoft and IBM (Lotus Notes) for years (and will continue to do so), says this is the move towards the trend of “team productivity.” Traditional Microsoft products, they say, are geared towards individual productivity. What they are referring to is Google Docs’ most important feature - the ability for users to collaborate over documents online, and simultaneously.

CapGemini will collect a £25 licence fee for each install, plus additional fees for service and maintenance.

Nostalgia for earlier times

Diptakirti, a batchmate from my B School reminisces about some phrases. Even I in 1996 during my short-lived sales tenure have been guilty of "Push-Selling" (ie. load the dealer with enough goods and you will get sales) Are such times really over? Over to Dipta

Boss, company is not understanding the problem…
When I started off in FMCG sales, it was a time without mobile phones and with floppy drives.
Companies wanted to sell irrational amounts of soap, toilet cleaners and other such products of eternal consequence. And they had already convinced a large group of MBAs to execute the plan. These MBAs – with their data interpretation and presentation skills – in turn, convinced another group of lesser mortals. The guys who repeated this problem to me some 482 times were these lesser mortals.
We would be at the depot, trying to invoice truckloads of stock without too much of an idea what the Madhubani distributors would do with 330 cases of soap (which can bathe all of Madhubani for about 7 months). And when all pleas not to do so would fall on deaf ears (mine), this phrase would come out with a deep sigh!
This statement of despair did not deter them from their duties, as they would still do what the company required of them but made this small complaint anyway. Companies no longer believe in those kinds of absurd billing nowadays. And in any case, I have moved out of frontline sales.
I miss that statement because it was a momentary despair of a soldier. He would still fight. He would probably win as well. But his wisdom and profound experience forced him to make that one note of protest before he moved on.
I miss the loyalty, tenacity and the cynicism of those guys.

The job hunt is changing

Penelope trunk blogs about the way traditional job hunt is changing. As social media evolves and the next generation of employees enter the workforce, does her analysis hold true for India too?

Her predictions:

1. Companies will make recruiting young employees the top priority.
2. Candidates will drive the hiring process rather than employers.
3. Companies will stop writing stupid ads.
4. The quality match will take center stage.
5. The workplace will get great.

In India, recruiting young employees is not just a priority but hiring generation X who is now in the 4-10 year work experience is the most critical for survival. Companies can hire younger people from school and train them but now they've got to come up with creative ways to plug their managerial talent gap. Like ICICI Bank is taking a leaf out of the PSU banks' tactics and coming up with a Probationary Officers' program.

Candidates still don't drive the hiring process in India, but I think that's about to change. As competition for talent gets fierce people will start to understand that the employer is no longer माइ बाप but rather an entity to be negotiated on equal terms with.

Interesting Facebook targeting approach that Joel points us to today. Social media trawling by recruiters will get more and more sophisticated. Currently recruiters in India are quite reactive and use Orkut and Yahoo groups to target active job seekers (like these two for HR professionals) . However I see a big learning curve ahead for them, and they will have to be proactive and anticipate better to target passive job seekers.

The Brand is the Talent

Tom Peters on why the second best players make the best coaches, and why in the world of business and government we don't follow that thumb rule.



Great video to see on a Monday morning and to think about for the week. He blogs about the same issue today as he says:

it's not an externally directed "war to snatch talent from the other guy" by "being more aggressive than the competition"—but an internally directed competition against ourselves (and our outrageously strong beliefs about people) in which we aim to create an unimaginably attractive workplace. Think Apple, BMW, Cirque du Soleil, Wegmans. And back to the Royal Navy, the Brits built a model of Excellence that had no parallels in its sphere in human history—it was a model about what could be that had never been before, and it was "the other guys" who were forced into the externally aimed "competitive," inferior, reactive, copyist mode.

Yep, don't think of only recruiting.

Think about great retention. And great recruiting with happen.

There is an I in Team

At the BNet Blog there's a post about five teamwork myths.

Well actually, it's quite common sense. Teams are not instant panacea for any problem. For actions that are needed to be taken quickly and decisively teams might be the wrong way to approach it.

Teams that have lots of hierarchical structure might be dysfunctional too as group think can occur quite rapidly.

Choosing a team and giving roles in a team is an art. Not all team leaders can do that very simply. In fact sometimes genius performers cannot really lead a team. Or it gets too much for them... take a look at Rahul Dravid.

Being a great team member starts with not others but by being aware of one's strengths, weaknesses and role. What role one chooses or is given is dictated by one's strengths. So there is a big "I" in the team. In fact, this was shown by Belbin Team Roles research too.

Officers, Gentlemen and now Managers

The management and leadership talent within India's defence forces is one of the ways organizations are tackling the shortage of middle and top level managers in the corporate world. I think the organizations need to approach the recruitment of such officers in the way they carry out hiring of college graduates - hire for attitude and train for skills. Another possibility would be to tie-up with the management colleges to train them on organization specific content amongst the same time they do the Management Development programmes. Thinking creatively and innovatively is the way to avoid the things this article states.

The Indian Air Force, for instance, is organising "a placement fair" for its retiring "air warriors" in New Delhi on September 22 and 23. "Close to 40 companies have already registered for the fair so far," said an officer.

"Every year, a large number of highly-trained, disciplined and multi-skilled personnel retire from service at a relatively younger age of 35 to 54," he said.

"The corporate world can benefit from hiring such personnel, who have at least 15-20 years experience in flying, navigation, air traffic control, aeronautical engineering, technology management and the like," he added.

The problem of a second career for armed forces personnel — over 60,000 of them retire every year — is of course quite acute. As reported earlier by the Times of India, there is a huge rush for the six-month intensive business management certificate course being held for officers in institutions like Indian Institute of Managements, XLRIs, MDI (Gurgaon) and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (Mumbai).

Indian Air Force pilots, of course, face no problem in getting jobs in the booming civil aviation arena. In fact, Air Force authorities had to tighten controls to prevent pilots from leaving the force in large numbers. But job opportunities for personnel from other streams still remains a problem.

CEOs private life and companies profitability

I really don't think there should be research that is so....well, intrusive. But this surely goes to show CEOs apart from movie stars and politicians really can't claim to have any part of their life private. :(

Via AESC's SearchWire

Should shareholders in a company care if the chief executive's child dies? What if the mother-in-law passes away? Such things don't normally figure in investment decisions. But maybe they should, according to a recent study by three finance professors. Mining a trove of Danish government data on thousands of businesses, they were able to track links between CEO-family deaths and the companies' profitability over a decade. It slid by about one-fifth, on average, in the two years after the death of a CEO's child, and by about 15% after the death of a spouse. As for an executive's mother-in-law, the old jokes seem to hold: The researchers found that profitability, on average, rose slightly after her demise. The study is part of an emerging -- and controversial -- area of financial research that delves into the lives and personalities of executives in search of links to stock prices and corporate performance. The trend is an outgrowth of the tendency to lionize CEOs as critical to the businesses they lead. If their performance is so vital, the researchers say, investors should want to know anything that could affect it. "When you go to the track, you study the horse," says David Yermack, a New York University finance professor. "Investing is not that different. You want to know as much as you can about the jockey." A study he co-wrote looked at executives' home purchases. It found that on average, the stocks of companies run by leaders who buy or build megamansions sharply underperform the market.

Of course, the standard disclaimer should be displayed to all such research. The one that states - correlation does not imply causation. That is the thing investors and business managers need to keep in mind whenever such research hits the street !

Small is better

As far as acquisitions go, according to a study by BCG (via Sify)

"The Brave New World of M&A," a recent study by Boston Consulting Group, says, "Deals that are above $1 billion destroy nearly twice as much value as transactions under $1 billion, reflecting the difficulties of integrating large targets."

BCG has studied more than 4,000 M&A deals and says that the number of mega deals in excess of $1 billion is rapidly increasing.

BCG's M&A findings come at a time when some domestic companies have just gulped down foreign companies that are larger than their own size for deals worth several billions of dollars.

The companies that went for multi-billion-dollar deals in the recent past include Tata Steel which acquired Corus Group and Hindalco which bought out Novelis.

However, BCG says it has not looked at these companies and cannot comment on any particular deal. BCG, however, has mapped most of the value-creating deals done so far and has studied 20 Indian companies involved in the M&A game.

"The complexity of the integration gets more complex," says Harshavardhan, partner and director at BCG. "The returns are less for bigger acquisitions," he adds.

I'm no expert on M&A but I suspect mergers are carried out for different purposes. One is the nature of the Tata-Corus deal. The focus of the acquiring entity is to gain scale and markets. The merger that might be better is the one that is carried out to gain capabilities like technology or expertise. The third kind is to acquire iconic brands, and that should be great way to build value too.

Prahalad on Globalization

So what does one of the leading management thinkers of the world think about Globalization?

Here's the answer. Thank God for YouTube !



And here's something very interesting for people who are appearing for job interviews. Tips on videos to stuff like how to do an investment banking interview and how to do the management consulting interview from Vault.

Continuing education

One of the roles I did when I worked internally in a global tech firm's OD group was to look at further education as a way to develop and retain talent.

The thing about continuing education for employees is not a very easy one to make for organizations. It's easier to conduct in-house training programs that are designed and customised for the organization. However, when it comes to sponsoring or encouraging employees to go to a university or other educational institutions to get a degree/diploma most organizations balk at the thought.

The hesitation stems from various factors:

1. Will the person return to the organization? This question almost always leads to the "service bonds" that the organization makes such employees sign. On the one hand it can be seen as a contract - we'll give you the time and other resources to educate yourself further, and you've got to come back and serve us. On the other hand it also tells the employee - look we really don't trust you and we'll like to have it in writing from you.
2. Will we have a role for the person's new skills and capabilities? When a person goes through education he/she picks up a variety of skills. Organizations need to have a constant communication channel when the employee is immersed in the course to find out how the employee is developing. However, firms are not able to deploy such energy to this effort.
3. How will the employee's expectations change? Often employees after interacting with fellow students for 2-3 years might change their expectations of what they want from their career and work. Organizations are wary about such an eventuality. However the way forward is the same. Keep a communication channel always open.

However what organizations should NOT do is promise opportunity for further education and later renege on such a promise. That's what happened to a friend and she had no hesitation in walking out from the firm and going on her own funding for her further educational dream.

McKinsey & Co. top consulting employer in the US

Vault has just released its guide to the USA’s top consulting employers, and McKinsey & Company ranks first overall in prestige. This is McKinsey’s seventh consecutive year in the top spot. In addition to rating peer firms on prestige, respondents were asked to rate their own firms on various quality of life issues such as company culture, compensation, hours and diversity.

It's also great to see an HR consulting firm also in the top 10 consulting employers along with all the strategy consulting firms up there. Great to see that working on HR consulting projects is seen as "prestigious" in the US.

It's very interesting to see that there are three 'related' firms in the top 10, Oliver Wyman's general management consulting division, the financial consulting division and Mercer HR consulting.

I only wish that there was an Indian firm like Vault or Kennedy Info to research similar data for the Indian management consulting industry.

3,640 consulting professionals took Vault's Consulting Survey in the spring of 2007. They were asked to rate consulting firms on a scale of 1 to 10, based on how prestigious they deem employment at each firm. Vault averaged the prestige scores for each firm and then ranked them in order. It's interesting to compare this to Consulting Magazine's 2006 list of the best firms to work for. Notice how the ranking's change when "prestige" is taken out of the equation?

The top 10 firms as ranked in the Vault Guide to the Top 50 Management and Strategy Consulting Firms are as follows:

1. McKinsey & Company                              New York, NY
2. The Boston Consulting Group                     Boston, MA
3. Bain & Company                                  Boston, MA
4. Booz Allen Hamilton                             McLean, VA
5. Monitor Group                                   Cambridge, MA
6. Oliver Wyman - General Management Consulting    New York, NY
7. Oliver Wyman - Financial Services               New York, NY
8. Deloitte Consulting LLP                         New York, NY
9. Mercer Human Resource Consulting                New York, NY
10. The Parthenon Group                            Boston, MA

Engaging Employees at work

It's been a long time since I linked to DD's posts, and the latest one which reviews a HBR article on the subject of employee engagement is a great example of the high quality blog posts we have become addicted to :-)

As he says:

In effect, people can be engaged in the long term, but still have bad days. When people are having good days, they are found to be more productive. So the question is to understand how you can create a continuous stream of good days? Amabile and Kramer give us two good ideas of how to increase those good days. First, enable progress, and second, manage with a human touch.

So what does enabling progress mean?

Good days consist of progress. From the management perspective of having a steady stream of good days, this means providing clearly articulated goals and objectives. Nothing kills a producer more than finding out after the fact that he/she has been spinning wheels on something that actually wasn’t important. Second, this means that once the manager has articulated a direction, priorities and deadlines, allow your talent to stick to the course. If your continuously re-prioritize or interrupt work for other tasks, you are continuously devaluing the work they are performing. The bottom line is that if management expects your talent to love their work, management needs to demonstrate it’s importance.

This is such a basic building block of management skills, that its scary how in facilitating management programs managers admit that they have to re-prioritise work because "people up the chain" keep doing that. Similarly when I do the program for the same manager's subordinates the response is similar -

• "I don't understand what the organization wants from me"
• "We work from week to week priorities"
• "I am so immersed in what I do everyday that I don't care what my yearly performance plans are. It hardly matters."

Are these the same reactions your people have when asked about what are the biggest key achievements? If you can't articulate the three biggest key achievements you need to achieve from yourself as well as from your team mates individually then you are probably doing a bad job of managing. I have heard managers say "But all my 22 responsibilities listed in my job description is important!" If you think so too, then it's time to corner your manager and say "If you could get just 2-3 achievements from me out of the 22 listed, what would they be?"

The answer might surprise you.

Barack Obama campaigns on Linkedin

Well he's not actually saying "vote for me" but merely asking a question. His campaign even has a group on Linkedin.

Well after YouTube's presidential debate, Linkedin is the latest tool in the US presidential race. Scott Allen has a post on his blog related to all things Linkedin and the comments are quite insightful about how people feel about what I think is a masterstroke by both Linkedin and Obama.

I've blogged earlier about how the Linkedin Answers feature could be used by small independent professionals and firms to showcase their expertise, but never did I imagine that asking a question could give one such a visibility.

My guess is that Linkedin is merely borrowing a trick from Yahoo's method of getting large groups to access its under-utilised features by using celebrities like former Indian President Abdul Kalam and actress Sushmita Sen. The reason I guess is to get higher page views and also involve the large majority of users of Linkedin who merely go to the site when there are requests to act on. This view is strengthened by Linkedin's Kay Luo's statement on Scott's blog where she states:

This is part of a Tech Entrepreneurship week on LinkedIn Answers. We will be featuring other questions from other people (not just candidates), as well.

The age for retirement

Reading this post by AK Menon I was reminded of a story I read somewhere about how the retirement age came to be 60. Apparently a European king feared that he would be overthrown by some Counts/Duke's of his own court. He thought of a way out to render such people ineffectual and then realised that all of them were over the age of 60. So he passed a decree that all people in his court over the age of 60 had to leave their post for the next generation.

And this decree apparently was taken up by other countries and over a hundred years later it has become a norm for people to retire after turning 60 or near about that.

Well I don't know how authentic the story is, but it can't be argued that a lot of people are successful after they turn 60. Capt. Nair started the Leela Group of hotels after having retired. Ratan Tata's success came after he turned 60.

So as AK says, if CEOs and entrepreneurs can be successful after turning 60, why not people in regular employment in the workforce? Specially for jobs that require knowledge work rather than muscle work :-)

Interesting Wikipedia article on Retirement

My blogging brochure

A large Indian firm contacted me and started preliminary discussions how I can help them with their business blogging initiatives.

So I made a list of what I have done which would mark me as a "business blogging" expert and I came up with this document. Do let me know if you think this needs improvement. I am sure it can be improved a lot !

And those who haven't seen it, here's one of my first presentations that I made to a client on business blogging.

Careful, it's a 2 MB presentation so downloading on a dial-up connection might not be a great idea.

However a better idea would be to see it here

The Taj Mahal of HR

Arjun Shekhar at the HR and OD collective blog is driven by zeal to build one:

Now to get back to the point - the bird in hand - We need to architect an exclusively HR Taj Mahal. That mecca of concepts to which a business leader will approach, stare in wonder and then get down on her knees and pray. Come, see and concur. No gyan. No opinions. Just agree to the Taj Mahal of HR. End of common sense.
As i said earlier, i have been doing some study on the topic and its not going to be easy. This business of building Taj Mahals. The problem is really acute because we don't have a solid foundation. Let me explain. Six Sigma is based on statistical tools and sciences. Rigour and precision is the basic building material. But all we have is shifting sands and non methods. Take Individual Behavior theory for instance. Do we really know what motivates somebody? Yes, we have a menu of guesses and 9 million by the no.of items on the menu times the combinations in which the variables could play out.

In my view, that's precisely this shifting sand nature of human behavior that makes HR interesting for me. Our search for certainty is misplaced. Heck, even finance or marketing can't say anything for certain anymore, no matter how many numbers they crunch or statistical models they build, one black swan is enough to upset their calculations ! When we deal with people black swans are not so rare :-)

As Prof. Madhukar Shukla writes in the comment to Arjun's post:

As a matter of fact, there are ample valid theories - in psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.) about human "beings". However, the moment we convert them from human "beings" to human "resources" - i.e., factor of production - these theories have no utility.... (let production/ supply-chain management/ or whoever take on the HR mantle)

If the constituency of HR professionals is people (human "beings"), then let's ask a simple: how many corporations will really value that their "human resources" achieve/live at SE/SA stage of Maslow's hierarchy, even though that may not be favourable to the "bottom line"? that "developing employees to their full potential" - their vyaktitva - is a more desirable goal for business than "returns to investors/promoters"?...

....so the bottom-line for the HR professional would be:

are we talking about "beings" or "resources"?

Business Schools: more future leaders learn to focus on the poor

Based on the idea that corporations can help lift millions of people out of poverty by turning them into small-scale entrepreneurs and micro-consumers, "Base of the Pyramid" (BOP) theory is rapidly appearing on business school curricula. Business school courses introduce students to the concept that the world's poor represent a huge potential market for products ranging from shampoos and detergents to computers and reading glasses. A survey of 112 business schools covering 21 different countries has revealed a sharp rise in recent years in the number of schools offering courses in BOP theory, reports Alison Damast in the article “BOP theory makes the grade" in BusinessWeek .

While just 13 schools offered such courses in 2001, numbers had risen to about 60 by 2005, with similar rapid growth expected for 2006/07. "Base of the Pyramid" theory has been hailed by some economic experts as a way to help eradicate global poverty. As more and more future leaders openly declare their interest in BOP theory, it is likely to become a staple of business school course work in the years ahead, the author writes.

In fact XLRI last year started an elective on Social Entrepreneurship and apparently after graduation three of the students who took that course are actually pursuing their business ideas.

Interesting news

From the Egon Zehnder Executive News Service

Leadership: no panacea for growing talent shortage in Asia

According to a recent survey of 600 chief executives of multinational companies with businesses across Asia, a shortage of qualified personnel ranked as the number one concern in China, the second-biggest in Japan and fourth-biggest in India, writes The Economist. The report found that problems were the same across almost every industry and sector, with the result that many companies will be forced to scale back ambitious Asian growth-plans. Analysts see the underlying cause as a failure of national education systems to keep pace with economic developments and match teaching to the skills needed by businesses.

A prominent example of the skills shortage is the vibrant IT industry, where a shortfall of 500,000 professionals is estimated by 2010 in India alone. And China will need to boost its current stock of 3,000 to 5,000 top managers to 75,000 business leaders in the next ten years, according to predictions by the McKinsey Global Institute. The study’s authors found that today less than “10% of Chinese job candidates, on average, were suitable for work in a foreign company.”

With such intense competition for talent, companies are being forced to look at how best they can retain qualified staff. Experts agree there is no ready panacea and multiple solutions are called for, measures include conventional carrots such as delayed bonus payments along with offers of career planning, “personal-development road maps” and mentoring. But companies have also been quick to exploit other culture-specific approaches. Many Asians are attracted by the idea of being part of a prestigious brand. In some parts of Asia employers prefer to recruit women, recognising that because they are often valued less by society, they work harder and show greater loyalty. Another measure is the adoption of a “boomerangers” policy, designed to encourage the return of employees who have already left, concludes the author.

Full story. “Capturing talent - Asia's skills shortage” in The Economist (18 August 2007).

A referral only job site

Ranjit Jatar who till recently used to head Pepsi's Sri Lankan and a part of South India operations has turned an entrepreneur in the job site space by launching Reffster, a referral based job site. Though I must add, the site is still not live and does not have any content.

It's interesting to note that NDTVjobs has also recently started advertising how people can make money by referring their friends for jobs listed there.

Reffster however claims not to be a regular job board but says it will only list "Premium Mid and Senior Management jobs" and that "Resumes will be forwarded to the specific Employer after a back end rigorous screening to ensure that only relevant CVs reach the HR department of the company".

While the latter USP would be a boon to many employers who reel under CV spam (lots of people post their CVs for all jobs listed without seeing if they meet the selection criteria or not) but it is the first claim that might make or break the company. Whereas the current jobsites all target their mass numbers (most jobs listed, most jobseekers registered) Reffster seems to be be taking a contrarian stand in the jobsite game.

It's important to realise that even in a mature market like the US when Jobster launched it focussed on the referral aspect with their tagline "great people know great people" but I guess that didn't work so well because they quickly moved to integrate vertical search and now aim to become a web 2.0 jobsite with people's career pages and a facebook application too.

So I am a bit sceptical of Reffster being a pure-play referral based job site, specially since premium middle and senior management people don't like to float their CV still on jobsites in India.

Am On Twitter now

After holding out for so long, I've decided to give in.

I'm Twittering so might want to duck !

Click here if you want to connect. But I warn you, my life is very boring to follow :-D

Indians amongst the top 25 consultants

Consulting Magazine releases its annual list of the top 25 consultants who matter in the profession for 2007 and there are quite a few Indians or People of Indian Origin on the list. Two from companies that are headquartered in India.

Romit Bahl MD of Infosys Consulting

Venguswamy Ramaswamy director of TCS’ global consulting practice

Punit Renjen leader of Deloitte Consulting’s Merger & Acquisitions Integration Services (MAIS) and Global Leader, Strategy & Operations.

Salil Parekh, executive chairman, Capgemini India.

The other interesting thing about the list is that there are examples like Tamra Chandler, managing vice president of global solutions and people at Hitachi Consulting. As the article says: Chandler’s job title, admittedly, is somewhat schizophrenic. “I have one foot in internal operations and one in external operations. Basically, I’m our chief people officer. I set people strategies,” she says. The internal part directly involves the firm’s culture and operating style. The external part “helps define the way we go to market. I work with our national and global leaders to build out our service offerings,” she continues. Yet, she still finds time to do client work. Chandler is the officer in charge of Hitachi’s Starbuck’s and Safeco engagements. That sounds like a very unusual job description to pull off !

Even Steven Gunby's role at BCG seems to have a big people focus. As his profile states: Gunby assumed his current role in 2004, revenues in the region have doubled, the firm’s officer ranks have grown by 50 percent and attrition has reached an all-time low. Gunby’s numerous recruiting, development and retention initiatives helped the firm earn recognition as the best small company and one of the Top 10 overall companies on Fortune’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” ranking.

Another person in the top 25 is Russ Hagey, Chief Talent Officer at Bain & Company.

Then there's Gary Smith, co-founder of Ivy Planning Group has been instrumental in leading diversity education, development and strategy for some of the world’s largest companies.

Seems like the people focus, attracting and developing consultants is as much a key skill for consulting firms as getting and keeping clients !

Working on the browser

One fine day I discovered that I could add Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo IM to my iGoogle page. This was an amazing discovery !

Now you really don't need to download applications on your desktop anymore. Does this mean that some of us really can get by without very high processing speeds on their laptop and desktops?

Then another day when searching for word documents through Google I discovered that you could really save them as a Google Document if you were logged into Google Accounts. By the way, have you seen the new Google Docs page? It looks like a desktop folder of documents.

Guess folks at Google who look after user interface realised that if the UI was familiar to what they have experienced earlier then usage might be better.

Web Worker Daily today has a cool collection of useful iGoogle widgets that are useful for "independents" and thanks to that I discovered the Google Analytics widget too ! So no need to visit the Analytics page separately to find out if more than a handful of people are reading this blog on any given day.

Hiring through the blog

Today's Times Ascent has an article how HR managers and recruiters can hire people by evaluating their blog postings.

In my view that kind of 'selection process' would only work for a very limited number of roles, that make use of written skills and require people to have an opinion.

Of course, there are specialised blogs that talk about stuff like programming and coding and a software recruiter can actually trawl such blogs to shortlist prospective candidates. However, you can't really rely only on blog posts to select such candidates.

However for firms that are keen on tracking the social media landscape hiring a highly visible and networked blogger can help enormously. Like Shel Israel states in this post about Forrester Research hiring A list blogger Jeremiah Owyang.

Amit Agarwal posted a nice analysis of how a start-up gains in traffic when a web celebrity quits their job to join them.

Bottom of the Pyramid HR

Abhijit blogs at the OD collective blog as to how HR people turn up their noses to working for the blue collar workforce. As he says:

Every HR person wants to begin and end their career in the corporate office. That's where the action is. Wrong. The action is really at the bottom of the pyramid. With the blue collar employees. There is new and path breaking work waiting to be done for workmen/ operators or whoever makes up the bottom of the pyramid for your employees. Even research done in this area is inadequate compared to the attention middle and senior level employees get. If the people who are fresh out of colleges and MBA programs do not actively try to put into practice what they have learnt, how will anything change?

He then thinks of a radical new strategy for HR departmental structures to address why the best HR people don't do ER/IR roles:

If the factory jobs or jobs that addressed HR issues of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOTP) employee population, went almost as high in the org chart as the HR jobs in the Corporate Office, we would be able to attract the freshly minted HR folks to build a career that focused on the largest chunks of the organization. While I know that this argument pans out differently in different sectors and in different organizations, yet I cannot help saying that the principles seem to be universally applicable.

The question is will conservative and traditional HR folks ever do this? Most HR folks are not radical questioners of the status quo as Abhijit. Then there is the question of business. The blue-collared workforce's contribution to the bottom line is viewed as minuscule compared to the management's role. That is the reason why the ratio of HR people to number of employees is different and why the compensation is different too.

On Teacher's Day

On Teacher's Day, here's wishing all teachers and trainers all the best for developing today and tomorrow's innovators and creators.

And also hoping that teachers and trainers take some time out to develop themselves. Our tomorrow is dependent on that :-)

Some great thoughts on learning courtesy Don Clark's page:

Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. - Gandhi

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think - Socrates

You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself. - Galileo Galilei

Learning is not a spectator sport. - D. Blocher

The only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated learning - truth that has been assimilated in experience. - Carl Rogers

I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. - Albert Einstein

Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is intellectual death. - Confucius (551-479 B.C.)

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. - Dudley Field Malone

Rules of the Orkut Age

That was the name of the discussion on CNN-IBN where the participants were blogger Rashmi Bansal, MTV's India GM Ashish Patil, lawyer Mohit Kapoor, Google India's MD Shailesh Rao and a consulting psychiatrist.

The audience was a motley mix of worried parents, some precocious 10-14 year olds (one stated "I don't like such sites" while another 12 year old said "I have not displayed my true age there")

The parents were worried that children don't go out to play so much since they spend 2-3 hours "orkutting" everyday. One even suggested the Google MD to make a system that Orkut logs out people who have been on it for longer than an hour.

Rashmi's point was that people who are not on Orkut take it much too seriously and youngsters who belong to certain communities on the network are view it as quite a फ़ालतू activity :-)

Anuradha SenGupta who was moderating the discussion asked Shailesh why is Orkut such a huge success in India...along with Brazil? The Google MD was quite clueless and gave some answer about how the need for connect is a universal need.

My take on it is quite different. Orkut was the first social network to really take off in India. Initially it was a 'invite only' network, and that fuelled a sense of "being with the crowd". And as the network grew it invited more and more people. In a sense it converted a lot of people who had only used the internet for email so far to make a profile there. The biggest thing was people's friends telling them "hey why aren't you on Orkut? All our classmates are there"

Ryze had been a big success in India for the older crowd until they made some disastrous changes and now they've stagnated.

The best comment in the discussion was by IBN's tech journalist Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan who said that earlier chatting was the rage and IRC was where all the youngsters went. But that has been replaced by IM now. Soon social networking will be figured out by people and we'll fit it into our normal virtual life-space.

So Much For 'Employee Experience'!

Guest Post by R Karthik

I started working in the IT industry only as late as the last quarter of 2006 and it was only after having come here that i got familiar with the phrasology 'Onboarding'-both concept and connotation. I heard of 'employee experience' during the 'onboarding phase' and figured out from the my organizational processes around new employee joining and orientation that this thing called 'onboarding experience' does go a long way in shaping or leading to 'cognitive consonance' or 'dissonance' in the minds of the buyer (the new employee who has chosen to join the organization). But then what i thought i knew now (that is then) was only the tip of the iceberg and an year later i would come to realise there is much more to onboarding than 'joining & orientation'.

I recently read a couple of white papers and articles around the subject, "who's onboarding whom?, comprehensive onboarding, measures of efficiency of your onboarding programme" and i learnt what it is about and what it is not about.

Several myths got shattered and it dawned on me that onboarding is aimed at connecting the new hires to 3 things within the organization.

-purpose

-people

-resources

In essence, the connect is to be established between people to people (other important touchpoints from across different departments for coordination and lateral decision-making), people to purpose (the mission and core objectives of the job for which the new employee has been hired), people to resources (important sources of information, decisions and power centres within).

Having said that, the Human Capital Institute (HCI), the publishing organization also adds in all of these articles that a survey conducted by them points that 60% of new hires form their opinions on whether to stick to the organization or otherwise within first 6 months.

Quite like us, companies too don't get a second chance to make a first impression.

So much for employee experience!